Rupert Brown

Rupert Brown was born in in1938. He studied graphic design at S E Essex School of Art. At 22 he was the youngest art director in London and then creative director at a premier advrtising agency, Evenett & Desoutter.

In 1964 he began a freelance career as a graphic designer, working from Blackheath, S E London for clients including Alcan Aluminium, British Telecom, BBCtv, Conoco, Ford Motor Company, The European Conservation Foundation, Kodak, The Observer Newspaper.

In 1971 he spent two years converting an 18th century clapboard watermill by the River Stour on the Essex/Suffolk border into a house and the adjascent stables into a graphic design and film animation studio. The work expanded to include the designing, editing, (sometimes illustrating) and the production of large format books for publishers such as Alfred Knopf (USA), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orbis, Mitchell Beazley, Collins and others.

In the 1980s he began painting, when commercial work allowed, and had a sell-out show at a local gallery, The Quay Theatre in Sudbury. However, the greatly increased volume of design work throughout the 90s meant that painting was again put on hold.

In 2002 his son, Oli, took over the design business. Brown’s interest in painting was to be rekindled after a year living in France, but his production rate has continued to be erratic with only private sales and commissions until 2009 when he began to paint more or less full time.

He paints mostly in watercolour because of its immediacy and chooses subjects that he knows well; landscapes in East Anglia, N W Scotland and the Mediterranean; local marine subjects, farm buildings and old machinery, as well as still lifes. The execution of a work has, of necessity because of the medium, to be relatively speedy irrespective of the size, but the preparation and planning can take anything up to a year.